The Last Confession of Mircea Voss

Father Andrei arrived at the Voss estate on the third night of October, when the mist had swallowed the road whole and his horse refused to go further than the iron gate. He had been summoned by letter — a letter written in a hand so trembling it barely qualified as script — from a man who claimed to be dying and wished to unburden his soul before God took him. The priest had made such visits before. He expected a bedridden old man, a guttering candle, perhaps a weeping daughter. He did not expect the door to open before he knocked.

The servant who greeted him had no name that he offered, and eyes that caught the lantern light the wrong way — too bright, too still, like coins pressed into a face rather than eyes grown there naturally. He led Father Andrei through corridors lined with portraits, each face more gaunt than the last, each painted in the same deep crimson and shadow that seemed less like artistic choice and more like a family condition. The house smelled of old stone and something sweeter beneath it, something that made the priest's stomach turn even as it pulled at him, the way the smell of a wound both repels and compels.

Mircea Voss was not bedridden. He stood at the window of his study, a tall man in a coat that had been fashionable perhaps forty years prior, his white hair loose around his shoulders, his hands clasped behind his back. He did not turn when Father Andrei entered. He spoke to the glass, to the dark beyond it, to whatever moved out there in the fog.

'You came,' said Mircea Voss. 'I was not certain you would. The road discourages visitors. I have spent considerable effort ensuring that it does.'

Father Andrei set his bag on the table and looked for a mirror. There was none in the room. He had noticed, walking through the house, that there were none anywhere — only the portraits, only those painted eyes following him down every hall. He told himself this was coincidence. He was not yet ready to stop telling himself that.

'You said you were dying,' the priest said. 'You look well enough to me.' It was not entirely true. Mircea Voss, when he finally turned from the window, had the look of a man who had been well for a very long time and was only now remembering what it felt like to be otherwise. His skin was the colour of old parchment. His eyes were dark, deeply set, and held within them a quality that Father Andrei could only describe, later, to the bishop who did not believe him, as depth — not the depth of intelligence or sorrow, but the depth of something that had been looking out from behind those eyes for far longer than any one man's life should allow.

'I am dying,' Mircea said. 'But not in the way you mean. Sit down, Father. What I have to tell you will take some time, and I find I am impatient tonight. The sun will come eventually, and I prefer to be finished before it does.'

The priest sat. He folded his hands. He listened. Outside, something moved through the fog with a sound like wings, though far too large for any bird he knew.

Mircea Voss had been born in 1683, the second son of a minor noble family whose lands bordered a forest that the local villagers refused to enter after dark. He had been a curious child, then a reckless young man, then a soldier, and then — in the winter of his twenty-eighth year, during a campaign that took him east into territory that did not appear on any map he had been given — something else entirely.

'There was a woman,' he said, and Father Andrei noted that even now, after what must have been well over a century of whatever existence this man had endured, the word woman still changed something in his face. Softened it. Made it briefly, terribly human. 'Her name was Ilinca. She lived alone in a house at the edge of a village that had no name on any document, in a valley that the other soldiers rode past without seeing. I saw it. I have never been certain whether that was fortune or its opposite.'

He had gone to her door seeking shelter from a storm. She had given it. She had given him food and warmth and conversation that lasted through the night, and he had found in her a mind so sharp and strange and beautiful that he had not wanted to leave when morning came. He had stayed a second night. A third. By the fourth night he understood that something was wrong — that the village outside her window was too quiet, that the other soldiers had not come looking for him, that time moved differently in that valley — but by then it was too late to care.

'She told me what she was on the seventh night,' Mircea said. 'She did not have to. I had already begun to suspect. The way she moved. The way she never ate, only watched me eat, with an expression I could not read — not hunger, exactly. Something more complicated than hunger. She told me, and then she asked me a question that no one had ever asked me before and no one has asked me since.' He paused. The fire in the grate had burned low. Neither of them moved to tend it. 'She asked me if I wanted to continue.'

Father Andrei said nothing. He was aware that his hands had tightened around his rosary, not in prayer but in something closer to instinct.

'I said yes,' Mircea said simply. 'I was twenty-eight years old and I had seen enough of the world to know that most of it was ugly and brief and ended in mud. She was offering me something else. I said yes, and she gave me what she had, and I became what I am, and for a long time — a very long time — I did not regret it.'

He told the priest about the centuries. Not all of them — there were not enough hours before dawn for all of them — but enough. He spoke of watching cities rise and burn and rise again. Of learning seven languages and forgetting three. Of the particular loneliness of outliving everyone who had ever known your name, and then outliving the people who had known those people, until you were a rumour, a ghost story, a name in a document that no living archivist could connect to a living face.

He spoke of Ilinca, who had made him and then left him — not cruelly, but with the calm certainty of someone who had done this before and knew that the made ones always needed to find their own way eventually. She had kissed his forehead like a mother, like a lover, like neither, and walked into a sunrise that he could not follow, and he had not seen her since. He had looked. For decades he had looked. He had found traces of her — a name in a parish record, a portrait in a Venetian palazzo that had her eyes — but never her.

'The hunger is not what the stories say,' Mircea told Father Andrei, who had by now stopped pretending to take notes and was simply listening, his pen dry in his hand. 'It is not a madness. It is more like a cold. A persistent, manageable cold that never quite goes away. You learn to live with it. You learn to feed carefully, to take only what is needed, to choose those who will not be missed — and here the priest flinched, and Mircea saw it — 'I know what you are thinking. I have thought it myself, every night for three hundred years. There is no answer that satisfies. There is only the choice, made again and again, to continue or not.'

He had continued. He had built this house in a valley much like the one where Ilinca had found him, in a forest that discouraged visitors, and he had lived here quietly for the better part of a century, feeding sparingly, keeping to himself, reading every book he could acquire, corresponding with scholars under assumed names, watching the world change through the window he now stood at again, his back to the priest, his voice growing quieter as the night deepened.

Father Andrei finally asked the question that had been sitting in his chest since he arrived. 'Why did you call for me? What is it you want absolution for?'

Mircea turned from the window. In the low light, with the fire nearly dead, he looked very old and very tired, and for the first time Father Andrei felt something other than fear in his presence. He felt, God help him, something like pity.

'Last spring,' Mircea said, 'a girl came to my gate. She was perhaps nineteen, lost, her horse lame, the storm coming. I let her in. I fed her — food, real food, from my kitchen — and I gave her a room and I sent her on her way in the morning with a fresh horse and directions to the nearest town.' He stopped. 'That is all. Nothing more than that. I did not harm her. I did not even frighten her, I think. She left smiling.'

'Then what is the sin?' the priest asked.

'The sin,' Mircea said, 'is that I wanted to. Every moment she was in this house, I wanted to. And I did not — but the wanting was so strong, Father, so much stronger than it has been in decades, that I understood something I had been avoiding understanding for a very long time.' He sat down at last, heavily, in the chair across from the priest. 'I am losing the part of me that chooses. The human part. The part that Ilinca told me I had to protect above everything else, because without it I would become something that could not be redeemed and could not be ended and would simply continue, empty and hungry, until the world itself ran out.' He looked at his hands. 'I am not there yet. But I can see it from here.'

The fire went out. Neither of them lit it again.

He did not want absolution, in the end. He had known, he said, that absolution was not something that could be given for what he was — only for what he had done, and what he had done was complicated enough that no single confession could contain it. What he wanted was simpler and stranger than absolution.

He wanted a witness.

'When the sun comes,' he said, 'I am going to open that window. I have been thinking about it for a long time. I have made my arrangements — the house will go to the village, the library to a university that will not ask questions, the money to people who need it more than I do. Everything is in order. I only wanted someone to know. Someone to remember that I was here, that I tried, that for three hundred years I chose, every night, to remain something that could still sit across from a priest and feel the weight of that choice.' He looked at Father Andrei steadily. 'Will you stay?'

Father Andrei stayed. He did not know, then or later, whether it was courage or shock or simple paralysis that kept him in his chair. He stayed, and he watched the sky outside the window begin its slow transformation from black to the deep blue that precedes dawn, and he said nothing, because there was nothing adequate to say.

Mircea Voss stood at the window. He straightened his coat. He looked out at the forest, at the mist beginning to thin, at the first pale suggestion of light along the eastern ridge. He said, very quietly, 'Ilinca,' and the word held in it everything that three hundred years of searching had not resolved.

Then he opened the window.

Father Andrei closed his eyes. When he opened them, the room was empty. The window stood open. The morning air moved through the study, cold and clean, carrying with it the smell of pine and frost and something else — something briefly sweet, briefly warm, that faded before he could name it.

He sat alone in the empty house for a long time. Then he gathered his bag, walked through the corridors of portraits with their painted eyes, out through the iron gate, and back down the road that was, in the daylight, perfectly ordinary. He told no one what he had seen. He wrote it down once, in a journal he kept locked, and never read it again.

But he thought about it. On cold October nights, when the mist came in and the candle burned low and the silence of the parish house pressed in around him, he thought about a man who had lived three hundred years and chosen, in the end, to stop. He thought about the word Ilinca, and the way it had sounded — not like a name, but like an answer to a question that had taken centuries to ask.

He thought about the girl with the lame horse, who had left smiling, and never knew how close she had come to the edge of something ancient and dark and, in its own terrible way, still capable of love.